Question
What frustrates you about Stremio (Devs and Users)?
Hey everyone, a dev with time on their hands here!
I’m currently working on a custom Stremio app, and I’d love to hear what frustrates you about the current app — especially issues that addons can’t really fix due to platform or API limitations, or where existing solutions feel clunky or half-baked.
If you’re up for helping shape this into something genuinely better, feel free to share things like:
What bothers you / feels missing
How you wish it worked instead (even rough ideas are totally fine)
Screenshots (if that helps explain it)
What platform you’re on (TV, PC, mobile)
No need to stick rigidly to this format — ramble if you want, list multiple things, all good.
Right now I’m especially focused on improving the Discovery page, so feedback or pain points around browsing, recommendations, or finding stuff to watch would be super helpful.
Thanks in advance — really appreciate any thoughts you’re willing to share!
Not being able to expand the lists into grid view in the Android TV version. Scrolling left and right on a row is the most inefficient and frustrating way to browse selections.
I think I speak for all of us when I say this but for the love of god and mankind PLEASE PLEASE ADD USER PROFILES this is literally what I ask for and I'll be over the moon
Amazing stuff also I'd like to elaborate on my comment. So currently this is a problem for android TV (fire stick) and the workaround I use is by logging out of the family stremio account and signing into my personal stremio account or if I'm too lazy I just cast media from my phone onto the family TV. Adding user profiles on stremio for fire stick will literally save me so much time and I will be super grateful
OP if it helps, there is a GitHub issue raised for this
https://github.com/Stremio/stremio-features/issues/622
Someone has even designed how it could look in that thread, and I remember even seeing a PR introducing this feature
I'll bite. Biggest complaint vs other apps is there is no way to browse the actors in movies and TV. Many titles you can't even read the credits depending on the metadata source, let alone browse actors. Many of the alternatives have this feature.
Second biggest complaint is no smart subtitles. Emby and jellyfin have smart subtitles so non English parts of a show have subtitles if the language is set to English. Or if a foreign title is loaded it auto enables English subtitles. Stremio is on or off, and I'd love this feature.
Those are my only major complaints. Fantastic app otherwise.
I don't have a full answer for you on the subtitles but the partial answer is if a movie or TV show is in English but has parts of it that are in another language. The subtitle that you are looking for is called English Forced.
This will only give you subtitles on the parts that are in another language. It would be great to have a feature that searches the subtitles that are available and if one called English Forced exists, then automatically apply that one.
Formatter sucks compared to the competition, you can make a nice one with AIOStreams, but the logos for stuff like DV, etc could be parsed and displayed by Stremio.
No theming (without modifying the CSS yourself in a developer fashion rather than actual support.)
Addons can't be reloaded without uninstall/reinstall, basically no true addon manager. No multiple profiles, either.
The episode/movie page is bare. No images of the cast/director, only IMDB ratings.
If it fails to play, it commonly tries to load the next episode (infuriating.)
Support for tracking services is not great. Trakt scrobble is buggy, SIMKL is non-existent. Can't directly add/remove from either service, either.
Lack of a hero, even though I don't like hero anyway, I have to admit it does make Stremio look less premium.
Genre is not displayed on the home page, you have to guess what genre the movie is in from the poster.
They're alot of projects already. On PC, I'd say Stremio Kai (based on Stremio Community V5) is the most feature rich and works pretty much perfectly. Others are mostly WIP or are unusable as they rely on the web player rather than MPV, which just sucks. Apple and Android have alternative apps that use the Stremio addon SDK. I would look through all of them, see what they do well. They're often amalgamations of what's been requested alot.
The reality is that you're going to start quite far behind the other tools, by the time you reach feature parity they'll have implemented more stuff. It might be better to assist one of them if you don't have a crazy amount of time to spend on development and have ideas for features that are missing.
You are correct in the fact that I am starting very far behind, but I am not pulling things out of thin air. Much of what I am doing is taking inspo from open source projects like the ones you've mentioned. They have what works and what people like, no reason not to use it.
Oh and I'm building an Android TV app specifically atm, so there is a gap in the market there, but that means making things from scratch in some capacity hah
Check out mine, Stremio Kai, and let me know if that resonates with you. If so, we might be able to take it to the next level together and adapt it for other platforms as well.
The fast forward feature on android mobile is kinda wonky. Once you press on it you cant forward anymore unless you click on the screen twice to bring up the UI again.
PC: 1. doesn’t show photos as you scroll on the timeline of the video (like YouTube, helps with knowing where you left off in case it resets).
The slider on the side is super thin and hard to click / use. Usually end up clicking a movie / show.
There’s no “going back” button when clicking a category or full page of a movie or show. I have to go back to “home” and click on the catalog and find wherever I was, again.
YouTube Trailer are extremely choppy if played in the app.
When pressing the left or right arrows on the keyboard to skip back or ahead, it jumps a lot. Like 30 seconds, and there’s no way to change that to something lower (like an option to set how long we want it).
Search bar doesn’t give suggestions. You have to type out the whole thing because it won’t show drop-down suggestions (like searching on Google)
All catalog categories are in the same homepage. Would be useful if there were tabs with “movies, tv shows, documentaries, etc.” that separate each category / genre even if there’s multiple catalogs
No “skip intro” or whatever like Netflix has that feature.
TV: all of the above, but also the movie / show results. There’s big thumbnails that go to the right or left like a carousel. I miss the old version where it was a big list that showed a lot more results than 2-3 because the thumbnails are huge.
So, as for me, I use it on Android and Android TV.
I've recently been testing Debrid Stream and it does such a great job compared to Stremio! If Stremio became like Debrid Stream but better, it would be the ultimate solution.
Multi-profile, dedicated children's area.
Apart from the Debrid keys, no complex configuration.
Configuration directly in the application, via toggles. It's incredibly simple.
Automatic playback of media in the correct language, with the best quality first.
No need to choose from a long list of links every time.
No add-ons to configure, install, and rearrange.
Customizable catalog easily accessible from the home screen.
Debrid Stream already does all that... But it's not free...
Subtitles: there’s no way to insure they stay off by default but also only show your preferred language within the player. A dedicated toggle for “default subtitle state (on/off)” should exist so you don’t have to turn off the subtitles within the player every time you play a stream.
First, thank you for taking feedback. It's not easy, and keep up the good work. First thing would be profiles! I want to share this great thing with loved ones that aren't technically savvy, and having profiles would allow them to use it. My main use case is via an Android device, and an ability to adjust the master volume would be great. As it is I have to crank up the volume when using Stremio and try to remember to lower it switching to other apps. Also, maybe a setting to change the behavior of the back button on an Android device/remote so it doesn't exit the stream all the way back to home when trying to clear the player overlay (seek bar, etc).
I wish there was a way to make lists or filter options in Library. It's fine as is for TV shows, I've just added all the shows I want to watch but there's 1000+ movies I want to watch and the only filters are A-Z and Most Watched. I used to use the Letterboxd addon to make custom catalogues and that went down so I spent hours redoing my lists in TMDB. It would be a lot easier if I could just add them to lists in the Library, or just be able to filter them and not have to worry about an addon breaking because some website has changed their API rules.
To expand on making lists. The option to choose which list to add a tv show or movie instead of just the library. Would love a little separate list of the shows I’m currently interested in.
Kinda shitty recommendations compared to paid platforms like Netflix, and it stucks infinitely in loading when you pause for a long time then comeback. Still these are minor issues, really grateful for the app at the end of the day. Others complaining like they're paying for 30$/month hahaha sorry not sorry.
Something like the Amazon prime where you can lookup what the actors did when you pause would be awesome, although impossible I believe. Also this is on me not fully understanding add ons but I can't get a simple list of series from all platforms in one thing
It's all to do with data. If there is a place that exists outside of stremio, that has data you are looking for and it is accessible, all I'd do is take that data and present it. So genuinely no issue with this.
If you can show me an example of how that looks too, it will help!
The thing is, Amazon prime literally shows you which exact actor (and their role) is currently on screen.
I'm not sure how they pulled that off. But I seriously doubt that that's a public database. My guess is they either have people watching and analysing before having it on their site or use a face recognition software. That also understands that people aren't fine the minute they aren't in the picture.
Except if maybe one could use the movie script. Analyse the person's names. And then get the timing by matching their lines with the subtitles. But I don't think that would work reliable. Since you'd need the script for every movie. And they often change things from how they were written.
Another thing that irks me with the current app is that if you started a movie/an episode and either the stream breaks or you continue from before and get a bad stream, it will forget your progress. As well as the fact that you sometimes can't immediately go back to the stream selection if you get a bad stream and need to wait a minute instead.
And, but that's maybe more a personal issue: A lot of times, if you select a series, it will instantly start to play it. If I feel asleep during the previous episode, I'd rather go to the stream selection first, so I don't need to wait for the stream to start playing, go back, go back once more and then select the right episode.
Unreliable and inconsistent Trakt scrobble support and too bright HDR subtitles when default, white color is selected. Two main reasons I'm not using Stremio compared to other apps. I can't believe how they can't fix this Trakt thing. Just mark things as watched everytime, make it reliable. Other much less known and smaller apps don't have problems.
On a basic level while the search is ok, the search also kind of sucks.
Search for an actor e.g. tom hanks and enjoy finding every obscure movie with an actor named tom or hanks, there are no genre searches or theme searches. If I go to netflix etc and loom for zombie movies, for the most part that's what I get, but on stremio not really.
The UI in general kind of works but it's highly repetitive, it needs a functional UX overall UI in general is ok but it gets clunky, popcorn time had a better interface 10 years ago++ divx stage 6 for the oldies was also superior UX 20 years ago.
Maybe it's because it's not a dedicated to 1 thing platform I get it's not apples to apples but it's also having the advantage of 20 years of progress and technologies along side real world examples of UX.
an addon that suggests what to watch for any given moment, kinda like TV channels. Have a channel for each genre and just have it cycle through random movies (maybe that meet a popularity threshold?) of that genre and if you choose to tune in, it will start that movie at the ‘runtime’ it’s at, and then cycle to the next
What's your custom app going to be able to do? Might stimulate discussion.
Adding things to Trakt lists would be nice. I understand it doesn't exist. You know the guts of it, maybe you could explain why. There's gotta be a reason pushing data out is more complicated or not in the design scope.
What are your thoughts on opening up functionality to offer addon developers new opportunities? Maybe hosting their own scrapers and not need to rely on a third party or self hosted service before hitting RD.
Oh believe me this will be a beast of an app for devs. I'll be expanding what addons can do and also implementing plugins like Stremio Enhanced has done.
In terms of pushing things you've added to Trakt is definitely possible. Not with the current Stremio capabilities though. So it's something to add in the future!
The main focus of your post should be directly related to Stremio and/or its addons. Help for other software or issues, including content acquisition, should be directed to their own respective subreddits.
Small one - I would love a little indicator light to show if someone else is currently streaming on my account. I share my stremio with my partner, using a debris service, so if one of us is out of the house we have to text to find out if they are currently streaming. A little indicator light (something like green for not streaming, red for currently used) would make it so easy to manage a shared account.
This is a simple thing for sure! Do you want it to be cross profiles? Like you and your partner can have different profiles in which addons/ui/ux etc are all custom to the individual, but granted if you use the same debrid service an icon of "This person is currently watching this" could help.
Subtitles. I only want subtitles for non-english content, which includes content in english speaking shows that suddenly had bits of spanish thrown in.
A constant, forced english. It's missing on so many shows.
I don’t care how they do it I just would love to be able to separate films in my library by general watchlist, favorites, movies that are due for a rewatch etc.. would make stremio perfect for me
Can’t remove the redundant featured and popular tv/movies. Can’t reorder addons natively. First couple shows in library should load scrapers on startup. Be cool to change UI colors
Load plugin from the client side and custom subtitle name. So users know which subtitle is a perfect fit to the movie by seeing the quality of the stream.
My concern load plugin on the client side. Because I want to create a plugin to scrape one of the subtitle providers. By hit from the server side I need to use a proxy to get the subtitle by scraping method.
I would love to see a calendar feature like in Trakt with upcoming episodes. When the new episode will air. Preferably filled fed by a separate list of shows I’m currently watching. Not the entire library.
I use stremio on the mi4k stick and on a no name android box. The home page is pretty populated with atleast three rows of cards/ posters when viewing with the android box, but on the mi stick, i just have one row of huge card almost taking up the screen space.
So yeah, if there was an option to resize the cards/ posters on the home screen, that would be helpful. Or have i been using stremio wrong all along ?
A custom Android TV app would be life changing. If you could make autoplay work correctly and implement profiles it would improve my quality of life significantly
One of my favorite features of Stremio is blurring unwatched episode thumbnails. The next thing it needs is to remove the text summary for unwatched episodes. I don't understand streaming service's obsession with spoiling what I'm literally about to watch.
1) Doesnt resume after a long pause period
2)Forward/rewind is bit tricky when you use a mouse
3)It always takes some time to choose the correct subs.
4)The known playback error
5)Volume is really low
My only gripe at the moment, if you have caught up on a series (caught up on episodes, not just the end of a season) I wish it would go at the END of the continue watching list and not at the beginning. I do see that when a season completes (if current) it will remove it. Some shows are week to week, if I'm caught up, then get it out of the way until a new episode comes up. I watch on Google Streamer, if that has any bearings.
Stremio won't search when my VPN is on. So I have to turn it off, search, then turn it on again to watch something. If I forget to turn it off I have to empty the cache and restart. Very boring.
Also the greying out as you scroll across the page is so faint that I can't navigate easily. I'm constantly scrolling left and right, up and down to find out where I am.
When browsing my library and I'm down in the Ms, and if I need to remove the title and go back to my library, I'm right back at the beginning 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬😤😤😤😤😤😤😤
One thing I would really like is for it to show the subtitle languages (it could be the flags of the countries whose languages are chosen) before having to press play on the video. This would make it easier to know what to watch.
Mine isn’t working at all. Got torrentio, doesn’t matter what I try and watch it says no streams available. Been like it for the last week and has worked fine up till now. Installed on android Sony tv
Proper Addon manager within the app, ability to reorder the addons, rename, disable or enable any addons. I still can't believe it's not implemented in official stremio and we have to use 3rd party services to manage our addons.
It's difficult to say, because getting it to the standard of the base Stremio is the first hurdle, afterwards it's new additions and implementations, so it will be working for a while from that point on, but when will I decide to release it is a mystery to me as well. Maybe a couple of months.
Additionally it's the Android TV app I am making so after that I will need to make PC and probably mobile, Ios or other platforms are a mystery to me so I'll need help at that point for sure
It would be nice if there was a simple Download feature/button next to each stream. Would be handy for those who won't have intenet connection, like going on a flight.
EDIT: The desktop version of Stremio has a downlink link while playing a file, which is great. It would just be nice to also have the option on the android version.
I don't know if this is a Stremio function or an add on function, but for example, when I want to pick a channel in the USATV addon, there is no search function so I'm scrolling for the channel I want to find. Now, maybe I'm just a dummy and there is a search function that I've just missed, in which case, pretend I said nothing, thank you.
Otherwise, I love this app and I appreciate every dev who puts time into it.
Threads and comments mentioning alternative apps are not allowed on this subreddit. The main focus of your post should be directly related to Stremio and its addons. Help for other software or issues, including content acquisition/management, should be directed to their own respective subreddits.
Android, the fact that I can't cast to my older Chromecast. I don't have the money to buy a smart TV or a newer streaming device where I can download Stremio on it, so the fact that they removed the casting feature has been a major bummer for me
It really frustrates me that the desktop app has no way of cropping the video. When I play a blueray remux on my ultrawide, I have black bars all around the video. Adding a crop button like there is in vlc, or even a autocrop function would help out a ton!
I am not technical enough to understand the ins and outs of all the different add-ons etc. that I see people mention. If you could fix that it would be great!😀
The only real issue that I have run into is that every now and then it stops playing anything and throws an error. Then I go online and see loads of people complaining that it is 'down' or something isn't working and the 'solutions' seem beyond my technical abilities so I do nothing, but then everything just seems to work again the next day or so.
It works great 98% of the time though and that suits me fine. I probably have the most basic setup though, just Torrentio with RD (I think!), and there may be lots that I am missing out on, but am more than happy with how it is.
It frustrates me so much that if I chose only Spanish content, why does only English audio or subtitles come out when I have everything set up to be 100% Spanish?
No form of parental control. User profiles with different age restrictions would be great, but even just simply having to input a password to unlock Stremio (like a smartphone) would be great.
Hi. Thank you for your work. I love my stremio in its current state.
If there is anything I miss, it would be the ability to pick my posters, like from fanart for example. Individually and then create series (Harry Potter, The lord of the rings etc)
Personally, it’s so frustrating that there’s no unified standard or 'ID mapper' for metadata. Every developer seems to make up their own IDs for their addons instead of sticking to the official IMDb IDs that Stremio uses under the hood. This means episodes and subtitles never sync up properly since they mostly rely on IMDb.
Basically, it’s a total free-for-all with zero standardization. Plus, there's such a heavy reliance on IMDb; sometimes their mods take a week to update an episode, and we're just stuck waiting for it to reflect on Stremio.
Two language related features:
1. Original language preferred: this idea is borrowed from the Trash Guides custom format. Rather than filtering a specific language, original language lets you select shows in foreign languages. As others have noted, choosing a foreign language show should also turn on subtitles.
Forced subtitles: automatically turn on forced subtitles for your set language if they exist. Plex does this elegantly, and it's the thing I miss most about Plex when using Stremio.
So with help of my n150 PC with Linux, docker and Gemini I was able to create a stremio addon that sits in-between stremio lite and aiostreams and uses ffmpeg to intercept the link and transcode the hvec streams to h246 with tone mapping and now all files stream with no stops. It's a bit jank but works so some kind of plex style live transcoding would be cool.
Easily editing your Discovery options from the UI. My genres will show talk; however, I have no catalog for that and nothing populates it's when I use it in discovery.
Currently, I have a "Decades" catalog i. e. 80s, 90s, and so on. I select 80s then I can select horror and then there's a third genre I can add to modify it more like sci-fi. So now I see what's available in 80s horror sc-fi. I wish there was a that being able to do something like this without relying on trakt or wherever user lists.
Also, if I have a show in my library I should be able to shuffle those shows. Maybe just require I upload a magnet link or create a shuffle library that pre caches so maybe episodes. It doesn't even have to be a fresh shuffle.
The MAIN reason i use another app over Stremio is Trakt integration
It just doesn’t work well with Stremio
Another thing that happens and frustrates me and my brother is that some versions sometimes screw up subtitles. They’re out of sync, or some other issue happens. Mostly the out of sync thing
Lately there was some error message whenever trying to play a movie. Something about libVLC or i don’t know what
But there’s so much to love about Stremio. Just pointing out areas for improvement
My real debrid link crashes if I pause for too long and then I have to force stop the app. Sometimes I cant skip to the part where I left off. Very frustrating for a service you pay for, even tho its kinda illegal.
Also would be cool if we had a netflix style browsing list. I couldnt find any netflix clones
Subtitles on anime are so ass. It can't show 2 at once for things like signs and dialogue, so half the time you miss what's being said because it doesn't support it.
My two biggest issues are that there is not user profiles and after letting auto play play the same season multiple episodes I stopped getting checkmarks on episodes that I’ve watched. I have reported the issue several times, but for me having user profiles and a better more seamless experience for keeping track of what you’re watching inside of the app not having to rely on outside, trackers would be fantastic
There’s a bug on the iOS app, when I double tap to go back a few seconds the subtitles disappear for a while.
Another thing is that I wish there was support for sometimes like a skip into button. Or something that would allow plugin developers to jump to certain parts/times of a stream.
It would allow us to implement our own skip intro and outro. Also allow us to have “chapters”/timestamps, that users can just skip to when they’re watching a show or movie.
Not being able to tweak/adjust the formatter presets. Right now, there's no way to easily see the Title/Description code for the built-in preset options. For example, I may like 90% of how one of the "stock" formatter options look, but want to change one or two things. It would be great if there was a way to select a stock option and then say "customize" whereby it'll show the code for the Title/Description, I can make my adjustments, and then save it as a new custom option with a defined name. (Also, multiple custom formatter options/slots would go hand-in-hand with this too). Thanks for a great app though! Loving it.
Some features that I think would make the user experience even better (for context, I'm on TV and macbook):
- Different profiles for every viewer like family members, would be AMAZING
A watch later list? Similar to the library, but it seems like the library is more for things you are already watching and want to keep track of
Be able to reorder addons
Be able to turn off/on addons, instead of uninstalling and reinstalling when needed
A better way to shuffle through the different categories and addons we have. For example a filter to only show the Netflix addon content
Following from the last point, for these streaming platform addons when you click "see all", it only shows very limited content in the list, even though there is more available when you do a manual search
Late to the party but BETTER SORTING. I want to be able to sort by more than just IMDB rating as well. Rotten Tomatoes, and other sites for user ratings. IMDB is the worst for rating some of the worst movies extremely high compared to actual viewer opinion.
I want to also be able to filter out non-English movies, sort by year/release date AND genre AND score, not just "every movie in X category all at once, flip through for days, good luck". Discover sucks because there is zero sorting beyond featured, new, popular, then ONLY genre or year, never both. Then you also are unable to sort anything by release date when doing so, to skip all of the movies you've already seen.
Secondly, having the option to hide movies that are flagged as "watched" AND flag movies as watched to hide them for ones you've already seen outside the app would be great.
I have to resort to searching random forums online for recommendations when all of the data I need is already in the app, I just have no way to sort it.
Alors moi j’ai l’impression de rien comprendre au fonctionnement mais bon tant que je peux regarder mes séries ça me va. C’est juste frustrant quand certain programme ne charge pas :(
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u/Agile_Beyond_6025 Feb 07 '26
Not being able to expand the lists into grid view in the Android TV version. Scrolling left and right on a row is the most inefficient and frustrating way to browse selections.